How the ubiquity of eyewitness media changes the mediation and visibility of protests in the news

This chapter examines how eyewitness footage travels from the street, through verification procedures in newsrooms, or diffusion on social media until it reaches our screens, and whether its ubiquity, the fact it is now systematically collected, processed and authenticated by newsrooms, has changed the mediation and visibility of protests. It argues that eyewitness footage is polysemic and polyvalent, because it is easily stripped of the context of its original upload, to appear in different contexts, with different descriptions, advancing different interpretation of events and different political goals. Eyewitness media of protests complicates journalism’s task of providing a trusted record of the present.